Unsolicited opinions – free to a good home

Roads in English towns and cities seem so much safer to me than their equivalents in Australia. They also have less deep kerbs, as a result of which cars can easily park with two wheels on the footpath (sidewalk) and two on the road, an opportunity they often make us of on roads that are too narrow to accommodate normal parallel parking.

Yet I feel safe.

Why do not I, as a pedestrian, feel threatened by having a more permeable barrier between the cars and the pedestrians than I am used to? Why doesn’t it make me feel less safe on an english footpath than on an Australian one?

Perhaps it is this: barriers work in both directions – they prevent things coming in but also prevent them going out. Skin protects infectious agents from getting at one’s innards (which is why cuts in the skin often lead to infection), but it also prevents the innards from losing moisture and other precious bodily fluids – from dessicating. And it is as important for prison walls to keep people out – who may be carrying phones, drugs, weapons or escape tools – as it is for them to keep inmates in.

So what does the kerb, as a barrier, prevent from going which way? The obvious answer is that it deters cars from going onto the footpath. A secondary answer is that it makes pedestrians think twice before stepping onto the road. But on an emotional level, it also acts as a barrier between the peace of the footpath and the violence of the cars on the road.

Because cars are violent. Moving a ton and a half of metal at speeds of 60-100 kilometres per hour is a violent activity. One does not notice this so much when one is sitting inside the hunk of metal. They are specially designed to mask the violence, to provide an illusion of serenity. They do this by sound-proofing, vibration-damping and engine-quietening. That’s why ads for luxury cars are often shot from the perspective of inside the cabin, to a soundtrack of blissful classical music: “See, there’s no violence here. It’s all beauty and grace”.

But the illusion is shattered when the car whooshes past a pedestrian or cyclist too closely or worse, when it collides with them, or with something else. The classical music appropriate to that is not so much Vivaldi’s Four Seasons as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (which, for the non-classical music lovers, was considered so shockingly violent when it premiered that the audience rioted in protest).

Indeed, the fast movement of heavy objects is unavoidably violent.

A brief digression: a visceral demonstration of this violence can be obtained by getting off a train in Europe at a station which high-speed intercity expresses pass through but do not stop. One has to take a non-express train to get there (or a bus, or walk or cycle) but it’s worth the effort. The express trains come past at speeds between 200 and 300 kilometres per hour, and the experience of having those thousands of tons of people and metal rush past only a metre or two away is unforgettable. Although they are not supersonic, one does not get much of an audible warning before they are upon you. Then there is a slam into a scanty few seconds of thunderous rush as the long line of carriages zooms by. The tail zaps by, you then dare to peek out over the track after it and there it is, already far away, dwindling into the distance at an amazing rate. The thought of what such a juggernaut would do if it struck something doesn’t bear thinking about.

Cars are neither as big nor as fast as express trains. But they still make an awful mess of a human body when they collide with one at any speed over about 30 km/h. The road is indeed, relative to the footpath, a place of great violence.

Back then to the barrier between peace and violence. In England, the barrier is less than in Australia, so why do I feel less afraid? I think it is because, rather than the violence of the road invading the pavement, the peace of the pavement starts to permeate the road! This is not an airy-fairy, metaphysical sensation. It can be measured objectively in car speeds and driver behaviour. The cars rarely drive faster than 30 km/h, are generally cautious and alert for, and respectful of, pedestrians and cyclists, and rarely use their horns. One just feels fairly safe, walking down an English street, including when one crosses the road. It is as if having only a flimsy barrier between pedestrians and motorists makes the motorists more aware of the violence of which they are capable, and influences them to be more cautious and respectful than they would be if the barrier were greater. In contrast, Australian drivers tend to accelerate to 60 km/h at every opportunity, regardless of whether that is a safe speed or even of whether it would shorten the expected journey length.

I am not suggesting that the flimsy barrier is the sole reason for the difference. I expect cultural norms built up over many decades, perhaps aided by laws that place greater responsibility for safety on motorists, contribute as well. But what is undeniable is that the urban terrorism of Australian motorists just doesn’t seem exist in the England, and maybe not even in most of Europe.

It makes walking or riding around town just so much more pleasant. I suspect maybe it makes driving more pleasant too. It is sometimes nice to feel one is not in a war zone.

Andrew Kirk

Bondi Junction, March 2018

PS The featured image for this essay is a shot from the 1974 Australian horror comedy movie ‘The Cars That Ate Paris‘. Get hold of a copy if you can and watch it. It sounds brilliant!

Where I live, near Sydney’s Eastern beaches, we have something we call mud. But it is not proper mud. Sure, it marks clothes, necessitating a wash, but is otherwise unremarkable.

I am currently in North Devon in England, where it has drizzled on every one of the six days since I arrived here.

Here they have PROPER mud.

It is sticky yet somehow also slippery. It makes squelchy noises when you tread in it. I went jogging beside a canal in Stratford-upon-Avon and, after the path ended, there was only grass interspersed with boggy bits of naked mud. I did my best to skirt around them, but that wasn’t possible in all cases and once or twice I had to actually tread in the mud. It looked very precarious, especially with the freezing canal only a metre away, ready to gobble me up if I slipped. As it happened, I only slipped once, falling away from the canal rather than towards it. My glove is now coloured by a souvenir of that special mud.

Sydney mud has too much sand in it.

English mud seems much more fertile. Mud is quickly regrown by vegetation if left undisturbed. Wherever I see mud I also see lush, fertile grass or close-packed, flourishing vegetable crops just nearby.

In that sense, mud is great – it is life.

But it is also death. The Great War, at least on the Western Front, seemed to be all about mud. It contaminated water to help spread disease, afflicted soldiers with Trench Foot, and it trapped horses, gun carriages and even soldiers, who could find themselves stuck in a position that was exposed to opposition gunfire. The bodies of soldiers killed by machine-gun fire, where they weren’t suspended on rolls of barbed wire, were soon partly or wholly swallowed up by mud. It was part of the horror.

There is something extraordinary about European mud. It is mythical. That’s why they write songs about it.

Perhaps it’s not just European mud. The song I had in mind was ‘Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud’, which I find is called ‘the Hippopotamus Song’ and is by Flanders and Swann (I had always assumed it was supposed to be a song for pigs). But a bit of web-searching informs me there are also lots of songs about American mud, although mostly in the South.

As the spine-chilling Maori Haka says, ‘It is death it is death it is life it is life…’ (‘Ka mate Ka mate Ka ora Ka ora’). One can imagine that life on Earth first originated in mud. There is so much richness in good mud, it would be difficult for life not to arise.

I realise that may not be scientific. I think a key reason why mud is so fertile is that it’s mostly organic, made up of lots of decayed organisms, animal and vegetable. So maybe they didn’t have mud on Earth before life arose, what with there being no decayed organisms around. Who knows, there was nobody there to write it down.

But even if life didn’t originate in mud, I bet that, once originated, it did an awful lot of evolving in there. We humans evolved in Africa, so I bet they have really impressive mud there. I’ve only been to North Africa, which is sandy, like Sydney, so I have never encountered real, proper African mud, of the sort that Joseph Conrad describes in Heart of Darkness.

If you are fortunate enough to live in a place where they have proper mud, I urge you to give it a thought next time you get caught in or covered by it, rather than just cursing as you head for the washing machine. Mud is magical stuff. No wonder little children loving playing in it.

It’s a busy time, the end of choir practice. It’s 9:05pm and I haven’t had my dinner. I need to put away chairs, don my cycling safety gear, unlock the bike and whiz back home to look for something to eat. Busy, busy, busy. So one is distracted, right?

And I found myself singing that famous line from the Hallelujah chorus

‘and She shall reign for ever and ever’

Why were you singing that, Andrew? I hear you ask.

Well the chorus had been the last thing we were practising and, you have to admit (if you’ve ever heard it) that it’s very catchy. No wonder that GF Handel was the Andrew Lloyd Webber of his day.

No, not that, you respond – I mean, why ‘She’? Don’t you know that the official lyric says ‘He’?

Well actually yes, I do know that, which is why I was a little surprised to find that my subconscious mind, after deciding to make me sing that song, had also decided to make me sing ‘She’. I don’t know why it did. I think it may be because there’s a lovely alliteration in ‘She shall….’ that you don’t get with ‘He’.

But then I thought to myself, as I strode in a purposeful and manly manner towards my bicycle, why not She? Where does it say that God has a sex, and that it is masculine?

Now I know what you’re thinking: the Bible and the Quran are both full of He this, He that, Father this and Lord the other. That’s true, but you ask any theologically sophisticated Christian or Muslim whether God has gonads and I’m pretty sure they’ll say ‘Of course not!’ God is much too big and impressive, not to mention invulnerable, to have a collection of soft, funny-looking, easily damaged organs dangling annoyingly between his legs.

I think there are two reasons why male pronouns and nouns are used to refer to God in the scriptures of Middle-Eastern religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism), both of which are to do with cultural traditions and have no theological basis.

The first is that ancient Middle-Eastern cultures, like most all other old cultures, including English and American, are patriarchal and use masculine pronouns in all cases except where the person being referred to is definitely female. All sorts of interesting reasons for this can be discussed but, whatever the reason, we cannot doubt that that is the practice. In a sense, ‘He’ is just the way of saying ‘She or He’ in that language tradition. In the modern, progressive parts of the world, we are working to undo those traditions, because of their toxic effect on sexual equality. But that’s a modern phenomenon that occurred centuries after the King James bible, let alone the original versions written in the period 950BCE – 150CE (600-900CE for the Quran).

The second reason is more specific. In those patriarchal cultures, it was assumed that a figure of authority must be male. Yahweh / Allah was the ultimate Boss, so It was described as male, as the notion of a female boss would have just been too incomprehensible – and unacceptable – to consumers of the stories.

Neither of these reasons retain any validity in modern, Western society, so there is no reason to perpetuate the implicitation of masculinity that was adopted at the time of writing. In fact, there are good reasons to actively overturn that implication, as just another undesirable plank in the ugly edifice of male dominance.

There is one other reason that was suggested to me by a Roman Catholic friend, that is more concrete. That is that Jesus was a man. Let’s accept for now the biblical narrative that there was a single man called Jesus of Nazareth, on whom the gospel stories are based, and whose body housed the incarnate spirit of God. Then the worldly container for the spirit of God did indeed have an XY chromosomal pattern, testicles and a penis. But why should that make us think that the immaterial spirit that pre-existed that body, and survived it, also has those things. We are told that Jesus had a beard. Does that mean that the spirit also has a beard?

If God’s plan was to incarnate as a human and preach an important message, It had three options for a body in which to incarnate: as a man, as a woman, or as a human of indeterminate sex. In Palestine CE30, only one of them had any chance of success. Nobody would have taken a woman seriously, and someone of indeterminate sex would likely have been put to death as a perceived infraction of God’s laws. So the choice of Christ (the part of God’s spirit that is said to have incarnated as Jesus) to incarnate as a man was simply an expedient, and says nothing about the sex of Christ.

Christians pray to Christ – the spirit – rather than to Jesus, even though they may say Jesus because it sounds more friendly. Jesus was the incarnated man, and he only existed for about thirty years. It is Christ that the religion says is eternally in heaven, and to whom a Christian prays. And there is nothing to credibly suggest that Christ has a sex.

Are there any other reasons why God should have a sex?

Thinks.

I can’t think of any that aren’t completely silly. One that immediately comes to mind is that God is The Boss, and bosses are more often than not male (although personally I have been fortunate to have had at least as many female as male bosses in my work career, and there is no doubt about who wields the power in the reasonably-happy home I inhabit). We’ve already dealt with that.

Another is that God is portrayed as a Father. But again, the intent of this metaphor (metaphor because It’s not really a father – there is no divine sperm involved) is to convey that God has the same loving, guiding, protective relationship to us that a parent typically has to their child. The scripture writers just wrote Father rather than Mother or Parent because of the language conventions mentioned above.

Any more reasons? No, I’m afraid I can’t think of any.

On the other side, there are excellent theological reasons against attributing a sex to God.

According to 1 John 4:8, God is Love. Does love have a specific sex? No.

According to John 1:1 God is The Word. Do words have a sex? No.

According to the influential theologian Paul Tillich, God is the Undifferentiated Ground of Being. Do Grounds of Being have a sex (provided we don’t differentiate them!)? No.

According to St Thomas Aquinas, God is Pure Actuality. If we distill Actuality until it is pure, does it acquire a sex? No.

According to St Augustine, God is Goodness Itself. Does Goodness have a sex? No.

I can tell you don’t want me to go on, so I won’t.

Right, now that we’re all agreed that God has no sex, what are we going to do about the fact that nearly all the words written and spoken about God attribute masculinity to It?

This is my plan. Please listen carefully.

From now on, whether you believe in God or not, in every reference you make to God that is in a context where use of a sexed pronoun is natural, I want you to use the female form.

As you are all intelligent and attentive readers, you naturally understand that this is not because I think God has a sex and that sex is female. Rather it is that, even if this idea went viral, it would have no hope of balancing out the enormous number of references to God as male that are out there. So we’ll keep on at this until God references achieve sexual parity, and then we’ll think about what to do next. This is not, as Alan Jones or Donald Trump might claim, ‘playing with words’ or ‘political correctness gone mad’. It’s just using sensible language that recognises that women and men are equally human and equally capable of anything except for a very few sex-specific activities such as fertilising an ovum or gestating a baby human. It’s a step that subverts the subtle message that only a man can be a person of power and wisdom. It’s a small but meaningful step in the project of gradually dismantling millennia of male dominance and oppression. And who better to lead such a step than the religions that have historically been – and unfortunately in some cases still are – platforms for those that seek to perpetuate that dominance.

So, if you please, it’ll be:

‘Our Mother who art in Heaven….’, in The Dame’s Prayer.

‘And He shall reign for ever and ever….’

Jesus is the Son of Woman (note the preservation of the word Son for Jesus, on account of the real-life testicles on the body used for Christ’s incarnation).

‘And She looked down on Her creation, and saw that it was good’.

The hymns will need reworking too:

‘Hail Redeemer Queen divine’

‘Queen of Queens, and Dame of Dames’

Everything, except specific references to the body of Jesus of Nazareth, has to go, and be replaced by its feminine equivalent.

What nice, friendly, inclusive places churches will become when this is adopted. I would happily visit them and sing along to ‘God rest ye merry (gentle)women’ in a spirit of ecumenical solidarity.

I don’t want to pick unfairly on Middle-Eastern religions, even though, they being by far the most powerful ones, they can take it. So let’s pause to consider the others.

Non-Middle-Eastern religions seem to generally be less patriarchal than the Middle-Eastern ones. There are powerful goddesses in Indian, Egyptian, Native American, Norse, Greek and Roman religions. But in all cases the boss of the gods is male. Apparently there have been, through the twentieth century, groups of scholars that believed that ancient religions such as druidism worshipped an Earth Mother type deity as their main focus, but these beliefs have fallen into disfavour in academia, and start to look more like wishful thinking of survivors of the Peace and Love generation of the sixties, than historically accurate accounts. The only well-known religions – ancient or modern – in which the most powerful being is female are neopagan religions such as Wicca. Well good for them, I say. But they are a very small minority, and the male dominance of the other religions I mentioned at least lets the Middle-Eastern triumvirate that currently dominates the world off the hook a little.

But Andrew, you protest, you are not a practising Christian, or a Muslim, or a Jew, so why should you care what words they use to talk about their gods?

You make a fair point, dear reader. The religions towards which I feel the greatest affinity are Buddhism and Vedanta, neither of which have any connection with the Middle East. But although I am not a Christian, Christianity has a major effect on my daily life and the lives of those around me, through the enormous influence that Christian power-brokers have on our laws and social customs. So it is in my interest, and in the interest of anybody that wishes for a kinder society, for the average Christian, as well as the power hierarchies of the various Christian sects, to become more consultative and compassionate. I think the religion becoming less male-dominated and male-oriented would help in moving along the road towards that goal.

And the same applies to Judaism and Islam. While their influences are minor where I live, there are parts of the world where their influence is intense. The people living in those regions would greatly benefit from those religions shedding some of their patriarchal orientation, and where better to start than to stop pretending that God is a bloke.

What a strange concept is Satan, the devil! He occupies such a large part in Western culture and literature that few people ever stop to reflect on the weirdness of the idea of a single person that is responsible for all the bad things in the world. Certainly I never considered it until the other day.

Satan seems to me to be a particularly Christian concept, in emphasis if not in origin. Other religions have supernatural beings with varying degrees of benevolence or malevolence, but I don’t think the concept of a single Prince of Darkness is widespread. China, India and Japan have mythologies replete with good and evil spirits, but no single spirit has control of all the bad stuff. For instance the Ramayana’s Rawanna, king of demons, comes across as more naughty than evil. So does Loki from Norse mythology. Actually Rawanna is a good deal less frightening to me than the Indian goddesses of destruction Kali and Durga, both of whom are worshipped by perfectly nice, law-abiding, kind people. I get the two mixed up, but one or both of them wears a necklace of skulls and is portrayed dancing on the bodies of those she has slain.

Chinese folk religion seems to encompass a multitude of evil spirits. We have to orient our houses the right way and do specific things with water, air, numbers and chants to keep them at bay.

Having multiple bad spirits seems to me like having a proliferation of petty criminals, whereas Satan is more like how Stalin appeared to the West at the height of the Cold War – the supreme leader of a tremendously powerful organisation capable of doing unfathomable harm. Some people, perhaps out of nostalgia for the good old days of the cold war, tried to resurrect that image with people like Osama Bin Laden, but it never really caught on. Stalin could have killed hundreds of millions just by pressing a button. Osama Bin Laden – to be blunt – couldn’t.

Satan does get the occasional mention in the two other Abrahamic religions: Judaism and Islam. After all, he makes his debut appearance in the Garden of Eden story in Genesis chapter three, which all three Abrahamic religions share.

But while I don’t know a whole lot about either Judaism or Islam, a bit of googling about devils in Judaism and Islam didn’t turn up anything with a prominence like the following from the RC baptismal rite:

Celebrant:Do you reject Satan?

Parents & Godparents:I do.

Celebrant: And all his works?

Parents & Godparents:I do.

Celebrant: And all his empty promises?

Parents & Godparents:I do.

You know you’ve made it to the big-time when an organisation with a billion members makes three successive references to you in the induction ceremony for every one of its new members.

The biggest speaking part that Satan is given in the Jewish scriptures – to my knowledge – is in the Book of Job, where he wagers with God (Yahweh) about whether Job can be induced to curse Yahweh if enough suffering is inflicted on him. Job is a fascinating book, partly because Satan comes across in it as a less malevolent entity than Yahweh. But I wouldn’t want my fate to be in the hands of either of them, as portrayed therein. There’s not a lot of ‘Duty of Care‘ going on.

Satan’s literary influence is so pervasive that his avatars pop up in secular literature as well. Classic instances of that are Sauron from Lord of the Rings and Voldemort from Harry Potter. Both are known as ‘the Dark Lord’ and have the honorific ‘Lord’ affixed before their name. One might ascribe Tolkien’s symbolism in Lord of the Rings to his Roman Catholicism. On the other hand JK Rowling is not a Christian, yet her use of such a clear Satan substitute shows how deeply embedded the role of Satan has become in Western culture, both religious and secular.

From a literary standpoint, having the notion of Satan is a wonderful cultural advantage. Pitting the hero(s) against the overwhelming odds of a leader of a massively powerful army of evil is so much more gripping than against a mere mortal villain.

Both Tolkien and Rowling hedged their bets a bit though. Both allude in their mythologies to earlier evils, which in some sense detracts from the uniqueness of their Dark Lords. With Tolkien it was Morgoth, while Rowling had Grindelwald. I think the latter name is unfortunate because Grindelwald is the name of a lovely village in the Swiss alps. I went there about thirty-five years ago and did not encounter any dark forces. But maybe it has changed since then.

Western culture has a rich tradition of tales about Satan and his followers. That has given us such chilling works of fiction as Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen and The Exorcist. The English author Dennis Wheatley wrote a series of best-selling novels about Satanist cults conjuring up the devil in gothic country mansions, sacrificing virgins and doing other dastardly deeds. Going back further in time we have Goethe’s Faust, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno. I have not read any of these three, although I know the story of Faust. I am keen to find time to read Paradise Lost (if only it weren’t so LONG!) because it is said that it presents Satan as a complex, multi-faceted character that is in some senses almost a tragic hero, rather than just the pure evil image to which we are generally subjected.

I don’t think I ever really believed in the devil entirely, although I said I did, both to others and to myself, because that was a requirement of the religion in which I was raised. I found Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen scary, but not so much The Exorcist.

On reflection, I think what scared me most about Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen was not the devil but rather his creepy followers. In Rosemary’s baby it was the solicitous, secretly Satan-worshipping neighbours that befriended Rosemary and took advantage of her trusting nature to gradually poison her with various herbs that they told her were medicine for a mild ailment she had. In The Omen it was the creepily motherly yet homicidal nursemaid, plus the kid Damian (son of Satan) who killed people by doing things like crashing his tricycle into them at the top of the stairs so that they fell and broke their neck. Malevolent children are always scary, regardless of whether any evil spirits are in sight. Horror movies love to make use of them, and ‘Lord of The Flies‘ is like the apotheosis of the evil children genre. How apt that William Golding chose the title ‘Lord of The Flies‘ for that novel, which is a translation of Beelzebub, one of Satan’s many names.

The book that scared me the most was Dracula. I read it at much too young an age and spent the next several years sleeping in terror with my head under the blankets to try to keep the vampires away. As far as I recall Dracula doesn’t actually mention the devil at all. Count Dracula is evil, but there is no suggestion in Bram Stoker’s book that he is unique.

I wonder what it is that made Satan such a prominent figure in Christianity, and the cultures that were heavily influenced by Christianity.

One theory I’ve come across is that, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the early 4th century CE, the Romans sought to spread the religion by discrediting the existing folk religions of Europe, many of which involved some sort of worship of nature and fertility. The sort of ‘dancing in a circle, naked in the woods‘ image that is associated in modern times with witches’ covens and satanic cults (in the popular imagination at least – whether also in reality I have no idea) may have been a feature of those pre-Christian folk religions. So associating them with a powerful evil figure would have been a way to discredit those religions, and maybe to justify suppressing them.

That theory has an intuitive appeal, but strikes the problem that for many of those folk religions the anthropomorphic image of nature that was worshipped was female – a mother goddess. Yet Satan is male.

An equally plausible, and rather simpler, explanation is that the notion of an immensely powerful Dark Lord just makes for a great story, and great stories make for successful social movements.

There’s an interesting theological conflict between the notion of Satan as the Embodiment of Evil on the one hand, and on the other, the Roman Catholic doctrine that evil is an absence of good, rather than a presence of something bad. The origin of that doctrine is first attributed to St Augustine (late 4th century), and later reinforced by St Thomas Aquinas (13th century). I find it hard to square this with Satan being an entity that is supposed to be actively evil. I have no idea what RC theologians make of this, although I am confident that their explanation would be extremely LONG. Make an explanation long enough and the chances are that the explainee will not raise any objections, out of sheer weariness and the fear that the explainer may launch into a further diatribe.

When I was in high school there was a boy who attended our school for a short while. He gained notoriety by telling people that he had seen the Devil. He had just woken up in the middle of the night and the Devil had been standing there at the foot of his bed. I remember that he had red eyes (the devil, not the boy), but can’t recall any other details being given. Still, the red eyes would be enough to narrow down the suspects fairly effectively if the police were to conduct a manhunt. A short conversation was had, twixt the boy and the devil. I don’t remember the topic but I do remember that it was surprisingly banal.

Did he really think he saw the devil, or did he just make up the story in order to gain attention and acceptance at a new school, as boys are wont to do? We’ll never know, because he left after being there only a couple of months. I hope it was made up, because such visions are often associated with mental illness and I wouldn’t wish for him to have suffered that.

Having meandered about all over the place in this essay (as usual) I feel I should lay my cards on the table and say that, although I think the devil is a marvellous literary figure that we couldn’t do without, I don’t believe in him any more. I hope that most other people don’t either, regardless of their religious or cultural associations, as belief in the devil seems to lead to black and white thinking that before you know it has medicine women being burned as witches and teenagers with schizophrenia being subjected to horrific exorcism rituals.

What I do believe in, at least in the middle of the night as I struggle out of bed to go and empty my bladder, is a frightful monster hiding under the bed with scaly claws that will grab my shins, pull me under the bed and then – I don’t know what then, but no doubt it will be horrific. But that’s more Doctor Who than Paradise Lost, and is the subject of another (not yet written) essay.

Now, having whinged shamelessly about the verbosity of both John Milton and of theologians, I had better stop here, lest I commit the very misdemeanor I have been moaning about.

I am re-committing to memory my old piano repertoire which, 25 years ago, comprised somewhat over an hour of music.

Playing complex piano pieces from memory amazes me. Any form of memorised material is impressive, but piano seems weirdest because one doesn’t have to just memorise a melody, but all the chords and counterpointal parts as well. There are usually three to eight notes being played at once, so superficially it sounds as though one has to memorise three to eight separate parts and play them simultaneously. It’s not really that hard (unless it’s a five-part fugue by JS Bach, and I haven’t memorised any fugues yet) because while there may be three notes in an A major triad in second inversion, they are not just any old three notes. They are three notes that nearly always go together. So one can just remember that there’s a triad there, rather than remembering three separate notes.

But still, there’s an awful lot of stuff to remember. I think concert pianists and Shakespearean actors are the most impressive to me in terms of memory feats.

I find it astounding to what extent the fingers – after a fair bit of effort at memorising – just know which notes to play. If you asked me what the next chord was, I could play it, but I couldn’t tell you beforehand what it was. I might even need a run-up to play it, because it seems that playing the chords leading up to it set the context that enables my fingers to ‘know’ what comes next. I know this because if I get lost and have to get re-started, there are only certain points in the piece from which I can start cold.

I have read that it’s really the Cerebellum that ‘remembers’ what to play, not the fingers. But it feels like it’s the fingers.

One can commit a piece to memory either consciously, so that one can say out loud what comes next – what chord it is, which notes and perhaps which of passages A, B, C or D it is in a Rondo structure – or unconsciously, by just playing it over and over from sheet music until it gets programmed into one’s subconscious.

I think it is safest to learn both ways.

Committing the piece to conscious memory is a safeguard against a crisis of faith or a sudden disorientation. Playing unconsciously relies on context to know what comes next and it needs faith so that one trusts one’s fingers to do the right thing. As soon as one loses context or faith – easy to do when under pressure in a performance – one can lose the ability to let one’s fingers do the work.

It is like the art of flying in the fourth HitchHiker book (‘So long and thanks for all the fish‘) or a Roadrunner cartoon where Wile E Coyote accidentally runs over a cliff but only falls when he looks down and realises where he is. You only lose the ability to fly when you remember that it is impossible. Then you suddenly plummet.

There is a very long trill in a Chopin Nocturne that mixes me up because it covers three notes and is more complex than an ordinary trill. I can play it fine, and very fast, as long as I don’t think about it. But because it’s long, I usually end up inadvertently thinking about what my fingers are doing about halfway through and then getting muddled. The last few times I have succeeded in playing it right through without mistake by looking around the room as I play it, focusing on things I see – keeping my mind occupied by anything except what my fingers are doing.

My fingers playing music are like me doing maths. They are very good at it as long as nobody is watching. But as soon as somebody is watching it turns to mud. Young children enjoy tormenting me by sidling up to me and asking me something embarrassingly easy like ‘differentiate x squared!‘ and then staring at me intently so that my brain won’t work (like a watched pot).

But if one also knows consciously what comes next, one can silently tell oneself to play an E flat diminished chord in the second inversion, or to reprise theme B, one octave higher. One knows how to do that, so one does it – no faith required. The conscious brain acts as scab labour to supplant the striking union of the unconscious fingers.

Although both conscious and unconscious memory always have a role to play, I feel that this time I am learning a lot more unconsciously than I did 25 years ago. I can see how much conscious involvement there was in 1991 because some of the scores still have the pencilled notes I wrote on them to help me categorise and memorise the thematic and harmonic structure of each piece. It’s more enjoyable learning subconsciously. But it’s higher risk to do only that, if one has to perform.

I have been finding that, once one has committed a piece thoroughly to memory, it is quite peaceful and meditative to play without thinking about the notes one is playing. One thinks about the music, because one puts the feeling into the piece by variations in loudness and pace, but not about the microstructure of the notes. That is beyond one’s gaze, being taken care of by the fingers/cerebellum.

It is important to keep one’s mind on the music though, otherwise the relentless, angst-ridden chatter of the modern monkey mind comes in to disturb the peace. I can remember occasions of playing pieces in the past, whether from sheet music or from memory, with my mind completely oblivious to the music and instead working philistinically though every grievance, anxiety and obsession it could find, re-running past conversations and projecting future ones at a rate that would make a Boddhisattva wince and that could generate material for at least three psychology PhD theses.

I wonder what concert performers do – whether they do both, or just one and if so which one? Or does it vary between performers?

In case anyone is interested, here are the pieces from the 1991 repertoire, showing which ones have so far been re-learned:

Beethoven Pathetique Sonata, all three movements (2nd and 3rd re-learned so far)

Mozart C major sonata, all three movements

Beethoven Moonlight Sonata First movement (the famous one)

Beethoven Fur Elise (re-learned)

Debussy First Arabesque (re-learned)

Debussy Clair de Lune

Chopin Nocturne in E flat major (re-learned)

Mr Beebe would say ‘Too much Beethoven‘.

But I will never be able to competently play the fiendishly difficult Opus 111 sonata whose crashing rendition by the troubled Miss Honeychurch prompted those immortal words.

I have vague aspirations to extend the list if I manage to re-learn all of it. I have in mind to do one of Faure’s three lovely impromptus. Given my comment above, I am tempted to also take up the challenge of attempting to memorise a Bach fugue. I probably shall. Sadly, nobody in my circle of friends and family seems to really like Bach fugues. Perhaps he really wrote them for the enjoyment of the performer rather than for the listener.

Although this third movement is less “pathetic” than the preceding ones, the player alone will be to blame should the Pathetic Sonata end apathetically.

Thus writes the author of Schirmer’s Library of Musical Classics, at the foot of the first page of the score of the last movement of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique (That’s ‘Pathetic’ as in pathos, ie emotionally moving, not as in contemptible, in case you were wondering). The bold font emphasis was added by me, by the way – it’s not in the original.

Many were the admonitions of this type that one used to encounter in learning, performing and reading about music. I don’t know if such admonitions still abound, but I used to take them very much to heart.

Here’s another gem from the last page of the same movement:

In proportion to the greater or lesser degree of passion put forth by the player before the calando, this latter is to be conceived as a diminuendo and ritardando. Excess in either direction is, of course, reprehensible.

A piano teacher once told me that, while Mozart piano sonatas seemed easy to play, especially the slow movements, they were actually especially difficult because their smooth lightness and sustained notes would ‘expose’ the inadequacy of any player whose touch upon the keys was not delicate and even. I interpreted this as meaning that only an impostor would attempt to play a Mozart Sonata without first obtaining the very highest degree of musical performance qualification possible. Their crime of trying to hide their lack of skill behind the apparent simplicity of the score would be exposed by the very first unplanned variation in pressure ( a ‘plonk’ in lay terms) leading to their justly deserved shame and humiliation and, it is to be hoped, excommunication from any future association with decent, honest, genuine music lovers.

Although I did take this sort of sermon to heart, I nevertheless dared to play sonatas by Mozart. I enjoyed it. But I just had to secretly hope that no true music connoisseurs would ever hear me, perhaps as they walked past the open window of the room in which I was playing, and be goaded into a rage by my lack of finesse – not to mention the unmitigated temerity of presuming to play Mozart. I imagined they would feel it were as though I had reanimated the corpse of Wolfgang Amadeus himself, just so I could slap him in the face and jeer at him.

I don’t think that any more. In fact, I may have swung so far to the opposite extreme that I have to remind myself not to be too intolerant of those poor souls that do happen to be internationally renowned piano virtuosi.

In short, I love amateur music. There is a point at which it may become difficult to listen to, as with a tone deaf singer or the tuneless screeching of a child unwillingly doing their ten minutes a day practice on the clarinet or violin. But short of that (and even that isn’t too bad, but that’s another essay) I find that musical flaws enhance rather than detract from the performance, as long as the player’s heart is in it. Sincerity and enthusiasm is all that’s needed to make a performance truly marvellous.

My youngest daughter will graduate this year from high school, after which I will no longer have a socially acceptable reason to attend performances of school musical ensembles, whose enthusiasm is often in inverse proportion to their skill. What a pity! Like a Persian carpet, where (it is said) the maker always includes a deliberate flaw because only Allah is allowed to be perfect, the flaws in an amateur musical performance are an essential ingredient, without which the performance would lack – I don’t know, maybe ‘soul’?

For ensembles of young children, the many mistakes, constantly varying level of pitch accuracy and plodding pace are, of course, adorable. But my liking for amateur music is not limited to a sentimental fondness for kitsch cuteness. I feel just as warmly about performances by tall, spotty adolescents in rock bands – as long as they have not been stage managed by Simon Cowell and do not have PR agents in tow. What is important is sincerity and enthusiasm. The occasional (or frequent) mistake emphasises the humanity of the performer.

And in any case, a liking of cuteness could not explain my recently acquired toleration of my own mistakes since, if I recall correctly, some biologist or other (was it Richard Dawkins? Or perhaps Francis Collins? I get them mixed up. Goodness knows they have so much in common) has proven conclusively that it is impossible for any individual member of any mammalian species to find itself cute. I’m not talking about pretending to be cute. All humans seem to do that at a certain age. But pretending to be cute is not the same as finding oneself cute. Indeed, it requires a healthy dose of cynicism to pretend to be naively clumsy and inarticulate just to manipulate the emotions of those around you. It must be done with a cold, clear, calculating mind and a total awareness of what one is doing, and leaves no possibility open for being taken in by one’s own deception. Or so I imagine. It is many years since I discarded any hope of garnering positive attention by feigning sweet ingenuity.

I digress. Refocussing: I think perhaps it is the humanity revealed through their imperfections that make amateur performances so valuable. We have had flawless performances available ever since the piano roll was invented. No doubt it is now possible for a computer to produce a virtuoso performance of a piece of music direct from the written score. I’m not knocking that. Even when that is done, we still have the human element provided by the composer. I doubt the day will ever come when a computer can write something like Beethoven’s fifth symphony. And if it does, I may find myself believing that the computer has attained consciousness.

But music is an activity for participation, not passive observation. Even apparently passive listening often involves participation of some sort. If one taps one’s foot, sways a little to the rhythm, or hums along, maybe out loud or maybe silently inside one’s head, one is participating. If that mild level of participation is enjoyable and life-affirming, how much more so when one is fully involved in producing the music? Churches seem to have understood this for a long time, with hymns that all the congregation participates in singing. I also think of the wonderful chants that some African villagers do, and of Australian Aboriginal corroborrees. As I understand it, these are social activities, in which all tribe members participate, rather than demonstrations of skill.

When one is learning to play an instrument or, having learned the instrument, trying to master a difficult new piece on the instrument, it can be disheartening to think that, however much effort one might put in, one will never be able to perform the piece as well as a computer program programmed by a mildly competent computer nerd, regardless of whether they have any musical ability. It is a little sad to think that the role of musical performance could be supplanted by instruments played by computers. My response to such negative thoughts is to remind myself that a critical part of any performance is the personal experience of the performer. It will be many centuries before they can program a computer to not only perform Scott Joplin’s ‘The Entertainer’, but to enjoy playing it as well.

That experience of playing multiplies when one is part of an ensemble. It is especially so in a choir, when one can feel the harmonies with the other singers resonating throughout one’s body.

I think the knowledge that there is an important experience of the performer is part of the experience of the listener too. If we reflect on it, we can feel that the performer is feeling the music and, in a way, communicating to us through the music. It would be different, a less complete experience, if the music were being performed by a (non-sentient) computer and we knew that to be the case.

And that’s why I think international piano competitions are bad! Does that opinion follow smoothly enough from the previous paragraph? No? Well, never mind, that’s how I feel. Like many of my opinions, that particular one (which is only a minor aspect of my overall preference for amateur music) was planted in my head by another. It was a talk given by an Australian that was an internationally renowned concert pianist – I forget their name – about how damaging the world of international piano competitions is to musical appreciation, as well as to the lives that compete in them. Most of the contestants are virtuosos, whose difference in skill can only be discerned by the most experienced of connoisseurs. Yet one person will win and be declared ‘better’ than the others. What nonsense. Perhaps the problem is that there are too many virtuoso pianists and not enough paid jobs for them.

The Berlin Philharmonic is an amazing orchestra and tremendous to listen to. But I wonder whether my daughter’s high school orchestra sounds more like the orchestras that premiered works by Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn or Schubert, than the Berlin Phil. From what I have read, the musicians of late eighteenth century Vienna were poorly paid, possibly ill and malnourished and distracted by the worldly cares that beset the financially insecure. They frequently had insufficient opportunity to learn and practice a new piece – sometimes with score changes occurring mid-rehearsal – and the halls in which they performed were irregularly heated, which would have driven constant variations in tuning. My brother and sister-in-law married in a small, freezing stone church in the midst of a dark Oxford winter. I remember the sounds of the string quartet drifting in and out of tune as they played ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’. The pitch went up when an eddy blew warm air from the bar heater towards them, and down when the warmth moved away. When I think about it, I realise that that is probably the way the piece was meant to be played. From what we know of JS Bach, the Leipzig churches in which his pieces were performed were probably even colder and draftier than the one in Oxford. There were no electric bar heaters in 1725.

And yet, even though the premier performances of those works may have been riddled with faults, the audiences still responded with adulation and rapturous applause. They could see past the occasional wrong note, loss of synchronisation and variation in pitch, to the underlying genius and emotional power of the composition, and the sincerity of the performers.

I don’t want to sound critical of virtuoso performers and ensembles. They are valuable too and have a key role to play in the world of music. I have no reason to doubt their dedication and sincerity or their enjoyment of the music they play. It is marvellous to hear every now and then a highly skilled performance of some challenging orchestral work. There are some, like Mahler’s second symphony (‘Resurrection’), that are so gargantuan – in both length and number of musicians and different instruments required – that it’s just not feasible to perform it with anything other than a top-level, fully professional orchestra. But they are not what music is about, just as teams like the All Blacks or Manchester United are not what sport is about. Attending an FA Cup Final or a Super Bowl would be a great experience but, given a choice between never being able to watch professional sport again and never being able to watch my children play sport, or play sport myself, I would give up watching professional sport in an instant. And it’s the same with music.

There’s nothing so strange about that – he’s a memorable character. What makes this worthy of comment is that I realised this morning, for the first time, that I regularly have dreams about Voldemort. But until recently, I have always forgotten them. This is the first time I realised that they are a recurring phenomenon.

They are fairly dramatic dreams. It’s a classic tale of the good (presumably that’s me, and my companions if I have any) trying to find the courage to face up to evil, to confront it, struggle against it – and the fear it evokes – and, one hopes, to vanquish it. Or at least to banish it until the next time it shows up.

Details are sketchy, and would be boring to relate. But the recurring scenario seems to be that, like Harry Potter, I need to venture into Voldemort’s lair (like Frodo going into Mordor) in order to try to bring his plans undone.

There is no absolute need for me to fight Voldemort – no duel with wands at twelve paces or anything like that. But I need to sneak into his headquarters like a secret agent, perhaps to steal some plans or sabotage some special evil-doing equipment he has constructed. I can’t remember the reasons why I need to go into his headquarters, but I do remember that the mission is essential if evil is not to triumph, and that I am very afraid that he will detect my presence and leap out of a wardrobe or somesuch and fling the full weight of his malevolent powers at me. And he does – every time. No matter how quietly I creep about, Voldemort always detects my presence and suddenly leaps out of a wardrobe to attack me with a splendid and terrifying roar.

What happens next I cannot remember. But something extended happens, because he doesn’t win instantly, killing me stone dead on the spot. Maybe some sort of supernatural scuffle and or flight/pursuit ensues and sooner or later I wake up out of that on account of all the excitement.

I don’t want to get too Freudian, but I can’t help feeling that these dreams tell me something. The idea of confronting one’s fears and deliberately going into danger, because it is the right thing to do, may have a strong emotional pull on me. I am, at heart, a romantic, notwithstanding my obsession with mathematics and the correct use of grammar.

A rather more surprising aspect is that the dream involves imagining a character that is supposed to be pure evil. It surprised me because I believe the idea of ‘pure evil’ is dangerous, hyperbolic nonsense. I don’t believe anybody is purely evili. We all do some good things and some bad things. Some people – serial killers, dictators, rednecked talkback radio hosts – do lots of extremely bad things, but I expect even they are not purely evil. I expect they are sometimes kind – to family, to friends, even to strangers that manage to excite their interest or compassion – in those occasional lulls of peace between slaughtering hitchhikers, invading neutral countries and stoking up hatred in resentful white heterosexuals for Muslims, gays or environmental activists.

I don’t believe that evil can be personified – that people like Sauron, Satan, Voldemort or The Penguin are possible. Although I then ask myself ‘Are we really supposed to see the mythological figure of Satan as pure evil?‘. Satan is actually a very interesting fictional character. Some of his complexity may stem from the delightfully baroque Roman Catholic teaching on evil – first cooked up by St Augustine in the fourth century. It says that evil is not a ‘thing’, ie it is not a substance or spirit or anything like that. It is just an absence of another thing that is a thing, which is the ‘good‘. It’s an interesting position, and quite appeals to me, up until the bit where it suggests that the ‘good‘ is a thing. That’s a bit too ectoplasmic for me – the idea that there’s some sort of invisible, nonphysical substance called ‘good’ that floats about and goes here but not there (one wonders, can it be hoovered up by those ectoplasm suction guns that the Ghostbusters use?). It’s needlessly multiplying entities, I reckon. Much easier to just say that people sometimes do kind things and sometimes do mean things, and some people do more of one than the other. William of Ockham would not approve of ‘goodness as a thing‘ (although, being RC, maybe he pretended to, in order to avoid being burnt).

Back to Satan, then: the interesting thing about him is that he isn’t portrayed even in orthodox Christian texts as being pure evil. His story is just that of an angel that didn’t want to serve as an angel any more and so – in what appears to me to be an admirable display of honesty and integrity – resigned. Some bits of the Bible such as the book of Job portray Satan as pretty nasty (but then Yahweh doesn’t come out of Job looking very nice either) but there seems room to view him as a complex, conflicted, multi-faceted figure. Certainly not the sort of person you’d want your daughter to marry, or that you’d trust to do your tax accounts, but not bad enough to deserve exile to an eternity of torment either. I haven’t read Paradise Lost but, by eavesdropping on more literate people that have, I have gained the impression that maybe what Milton was trying to do there was investigate that complexity: Satan as exile, as rebel, as lonely iconoclast.

I digress. Sorry about that. Yes, well I don’t believe in evil as freestanding substance, and I certainly don’t believe in entities that personify evil. So it’s interesting that I dream regularly about battling a character who was created to represent pure evil. Does it mean that my disbelief in evil is purely intellectual, and that deep down I am as credulous and fearful of evil spirits as a Neolithic cave-dweller? Perhaps. Who knows?

Or perhaps even Voldemort is not pure evil. After all, JK Rowling does give him an unhappy childhood, to hint at the idea that maybe he was not always that way – that he was as much a product of his environment as anybody else.

But then I can’t be 100% sure that the terrifying Dark Lord in my dream is always Voldemort. All I know for sure is that in the most recent dream it was Voldemort, and that the dream series in general is about a stupendously powerful being (much more powerful than me) that wishes harm to all sentient beings in the universe. Perhaps other dreams are about Sauron, the Wicked Witch of the West, Darth Vader, or John Le Carré’s Soviet spymaster Karlaii.

Thank goodness my dream self has enough courage to go through with the daring mission each time. It would be mortifying if the last scene of the dream, instead of a big fight-or-flight with a terrifying Dark Lord, saw me skulking about at home in shame and humiliation, having realised that I was too scared to go on the mission that was the free world’s last chance.

I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, that I have one of the bravest dream selves in the observable universe. Now there’s a boast to conjure with! Who else can claim as much?

Andrew Kirk

Bondi Junction, March 2016

i And No, Tim Minchin, – much as I love most of your work and, like you, detest the power structures and many of the teachings of the RC church – not even George Pell.